there was a brief reignition of national evangelical sentiment in a re-run of the Moral Majority movement, but much weaker than before, so you could actually see people say on TV that homosexuality is evil, but it definitely wasn't the prevailing sentiment. if anything the evangelicals were seen as an annoying group of dogmatic retards that believed a lot of stupid shit. a celebrity being rumored to be gay was a minor scandal. the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy in the US military came into effect at the beginning of 1994, meaning homosexuality was now officially tolerated in the armed forces as long as you didn't make an issue of yourself. Elton John publicly acknowledged being gay in 1992 (he had previously claimed to be bisexual) to barely any fanfare. Ellen Degeneres came out in 1997 and was widely accepted and applauded for it. the list of 90s TV shows that featured gay characters in limited but notable roles is
too long for this post, but Will & Grace, a sitcom featuring a gay main character, debuted in 1998 and was lauded for it, and enjoyed decent popularity. in short, the 90s were a time of revolutionary advancements in gay acceptance.
if you're looking for times where gay people were genuinely oppressed, you'll have to look back to the 70s and 80s.
Stonewall happened in '69, which is largely seen as the first major collision between the gay community and mainstream culture, sparking the gay pride movement. the AIDS epidemic was the next major flashpoint - the Reagan administration famously referred to it as
the gay plague in its early days (which was a term also used by researchers who discovered the disease, as the first major group of people the disease was discovered in were
gay men from California), leading to the popular (at least partially correct) impression that gay men were literally breeding new sexual diseases. for a time, contraction of AIDS was linked directly with homosexuality, which meant that when HIV infected the medical blood supply, people who got surprise AIDS from blood transfusions had to suppress the information to avoid the controversy of being assumed to be gay (
Isaac Asimov is one example of this). back then you could actually sincerely say that large parts of power and society in this country either ignored gays or openly disparaged or persecuted them.
